Apple Introduces New MacBook Air and Mac Pro, "Unlike Any We've Ever Made"

While Apple's WWDC isn't traditionally a big hardware show, the company usually has a couple of announcements and yesterday's included a revamped line of the popular MacBook Air notebooks, and more impressively, a completely new look for the Mac Pro workstation. The Air line, which is available now, will undoubtedly sell more units, but the Mac Pro, which won't be out until the fall, is a far more interesting update.

Mac now has a 72 million unit installed base, noted Apple CEO Tim Cook, and it has grown at a 15 percent rate over the past five years, compared with three percent for the overall PC market. Even so, he was quite clear that Apple's goal isn't to be the largest maker of PCs, but rather to have the top customer satisfaction in the field.

MacBook Air

The new MacBook Air line looks pretty much identical to previous units, with 11.6- and 13.3-inch versions, but is distinguished mainly by its inclusion of the new 4th-Generation Intel Core processor, known as Haswell, specifically the ultra-low voltage line. Apple said the base models will include a 1.3GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 (with Turbo Boost up to 2.6GHz) with 3MB shared L3 cache, and for an additional $150, you can upgrade to a 1.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i7 (with Turbo Boost up to 3.3GHz) with 4MB shared L3 cache. Apple didn't give specific part numbers, but based on the specs, it sounds like the base processor is a Core i5-4250U with the upgrade a Core i7-4650U.

The big advantage here should be lower power consumption. Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, introduced the new hardware and said the new units will offer "all-day battery life." (The 11-inch model will now provide up to nine hours of battery life up from five hours in the previous version and the 13-inch one will provide up to 12 hours up from 7 hours.)

Another advantage should be improved graphics, with the new processors offering twice the number of GPU execution levels as the previous generation. (Intel calls this HD Graphics 5000 or GT3 graphics, and normally markets this as Iris graphics.) Schiller said this should result in up to 40 percent faster graphics.

Apple has doubled the flash storage in both base units to 128GB, and upgraded to faster flash storage, promising up to 45 percent faster storage. Pricing continues to start at $999 for the base 11-inch MacBook Air and $1,099 for the base 13-inch model.

There are a few other changes, including 802.11ac Wi-Fi, which Apple says is up to three times faster. (In the real world, I haven't seen quite that level of improvement in other 802.11ac implements because Internet connections are often limited by the server provider, but it does seem to be a bit faster and more reliable.) Apple is also introducing a new companion AirPort Extreme with 802.11ac support.

Overall, these remain among the most attractive thin notebooks on the market, even though they are not nearly as unusual as they once were. Over the past few years, just about every PC maker has created a thin laptop, and Intel has aggressively promoted its Ultrabook branding. Last week at Computex, we saw a number of very light and thin notebooks with the Haswell chips, many of which have touch screens—something Apple continues to steer clear of on its notebooks despite pioneering work on tablets.

The Mac Pro "Sneak Peek"

The MacBook Airs were pretty much overshadowed by the new Mac Pro. Schiller gave a "sneak peek" as the Mac Pro won't be delivered until the fall. The design is certainly unusual, with the guts of the machine fitting into a small, black, cylindrical package that he said uses only one-eighth of the volume of the previous generation Mac Pro.

The hardware specs are impressive. It will run what Apple describes as a new generation Xeon E5. (Since Intel hasn't said its 22nm Xeon E5s are shipping yet, my guess is that's what Apple is waiting for, and that the Mac Pro will use two six-core CPUs.) This will offer up to 12 cores, including 1866 MHz DDR3 memory and up to 60GB/s of PCI Express Gen 3 bandwidth. It runs PCI Express-based flash storage, which Schiller said is 2.5 times faster than SATA-based SSDs and 10 times faster than a hard drive. On the graphics side, it uses two AMD Firepro workstation graphics cards and can support up to three 4K displays using these internal graphics.

It offers six Thunderbolt 2 ports, using a new spec Apple says is twice as fast as the existing Thunderbolt, along with four USB 3 ports, two Gigabit Ethernet connectors, and HDMI. But in stark contrast to just about every other workstation on the market, all of the expansion will be external.

"This is a machine unlike anything we've ever made both inside and out" Schiller said in describing the new design. It offers some interesting features such as lights to make the ports more visible and a handle on top to make it easier to carry. But while he said it has a "new unified thermal core," which "even sounds cool," I do have to wonder if the relatively small design will limit the speed of the internal components such as the CPU and the graphics due to airflow and power considerations. That's been a big concern in workstation designs and certainly companies like Dell, HP, IBM, and Lenovo as well as many smaller vendors will be making workstations with similar CPUs and AMD or Nvidia Tesla graphics (albeit not with the OS X operating system).

In any case, it's a big step up from the previous Mac Pros, which hadn't been updated in years. I was a bit surprised to find that it wasn't ready to ship yet, but the design is certainly impressive. Schiller described this as "a Mac unlike any we've ever made," and it certainly looks that way.

Michael J. Miller's Forward Thinking Blog: forwardthinking.pcmag.com
Michael J. Miller is chief information officer at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. From 1991 to 2005, Miller was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine, responsible for the editorial direction, quality and presentation of the world's largest computer publication.
Until late 2006, Miller was the Chief Content Officer for Ziff Davis Media, responsible for overseeing the editorial positions of Ziff Davis's magazines, websites, and events. As Editorial Director for Ziff Davis Publishing since 1997, Miller took an active role in...
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